Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric

Rating:
Summary: Read this book.
Review: Vitanza, a (post)modern day sophist, is (not) serious. When he explodes the border zones of RhetoriK's History by exposing its hystery, by "letting in everybody," by enacting a radical affirmation that says No *only* to (k)no(w)--he does (not) mean for us to take him seriously. If we were to ask him "Are you serious/Seriosus?!" he would un/surely respond with a resounding "Nes/Yo." Vitanza is after a "general" (Bataille) or "libidinal" (Lyotard) economy of thought/desire, and this/his "book" (more on that in a second) devotes itself to detonating the borders/boundaries that restrict free flowing desire. What is it that Vitanza wants? To attend to the (radically) Other. He's not so much interested in the sophistic trick of making the weaker side the stronger as he is in exposing and embracing the fluid middle/muddle, the excluded third, the dirty underside that must be silenced/effaced for any "dichotomy" to show up *as* a dichotomy. Vitanza, then, is a sophist of the third kind, a harbinger of the Third Sophsitic. In his efforts to denegate the negative, to offer a radically affirmative historiography, he embraces *as* rhetoric's history the very voices that had to be excluded for The History of Rhetoric to present itself as such. "There are hysteries in rhetorik rather than The history of rhetorik," Vitanza says, and "[h]ysteries of rhetorics speak through the savage silences of Dora, through the savage miraculating body of Schreber and savage dreams of the Wolfman, through the savage acts of Lacan's Christine and Léa Papin--all of which are excluded, through "negation" (repression/suppression) from The History of Rhetorik (oppression)" (319).

Whether Vitanza's "book" can really be called a book is an interesting question. Its very structure disrupts and challenges the sense of authority and closure that is typically expected from the book as a medium. Vitanza's performative prose enacts language in a way that exposes the hypertextual playfulness beneath the discursive imperative. That is, it both addresses and *performs* a linguistic overflow that "civilized" discourse cannot finally expel or absorb. So, while certainly progressing forward, it also proceeds to "steal and fly"--as one of his most important influences (Hélène Cixous) might put it--to steal and fly seemingly *everywhere*, in all directions at once. Through his light manipulation of typography--his unusual and/or illegal diacritical marks--and his joyful skewing of grammatical/mechanical injunctions, Vitanza manages to write a "book" that is no book, that in fact acts as a showcase for language's perpetual mis/behavior--indeed, this "book" exposes and affirms the "authority" not of the author but of the language that takes the author hostage.

The bottom line: _Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric_ is a linguistic tour de force, a must read that will leave no reader unmoved.

Rating:
Summary: To read this book is to challenge all you k(no)w.
Review: With his Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric, Victor Vitanza makes a gift to us, his readers, of an "attempt at an 'erotic' book without reserve" (9). Yet, in order to receive this gift, in order to attend to this book, we must make our own attempt to not ask what the book means or what do we want from this book (9). For these questions are framed in terms of subjects of desires (What Do "I" Want?)--which as we know require negated objects. Such a question restricts the question of desire within a dialectical frame of mind. What if, however, we stop asking "What do I want" or "What does this mean?" (which is the same question, after all)? What if we, contrariwise, figure desire within a general economy where we stop figuring ourselves as subjects of desire (masters) or libertines (sadists) but as sovereigns, where the question of desire is one of How to give? How to attend to the other?

Vitanza's book then asks its readers to receive this gift without reserve--that is, to read by way of a general, not restricted economy. If we receive thus we will have accepted his challenge to reconsider desire and to revisit our (erotic) relation to others in/through language. Vitanza's gift to us is wrapped in the immediate challenge to overcome the History of Rhetoric as it has been canonized via the Negative; but of course, as we continue to unwrap the text, we are also offered the gift, the challenge to overcome our own subjectivity--a subjectivity based on bad faith and ressentiment, subject to k(no)w. And if we accept this challenge, we will find ourselves attending to the kai(e)rotic moment wherein desire desires desire, not its fulfillment, and where it luxuriously, unreproductively, uselessly spasms via "rherotics" (24): subjectivities without reserve, language without reserve, histories without reserve.

Georges Bataille argued that during the twentieth century, the intimacy between self and other had become merely a relation of self and things, demanding returns and profits; likewise, today, at the end of the twentieth century, we could argue that the relation between self and other has become merely a relation of self and information. The question of/for desire within this economy is always: "What is the pay off?"--Answers, of course, which risk nothing, but merely keep exchanges within the restricted economy of supply and demand. In contradistinction to this economy, Vitanza asks us to desire dangerously, without reserve, without return, as a sovereign. The figure of the Vitanzian Sovereign requires that one sacrifice both the self and the other. This risk appears to the subject as irresponsible, apolitical, and apathetic. But it is a risk that must be made, if we are to overcome the negative and its death-grip on all we know of sociality, community, and the other. We are subjects, subject to the Negative. But the sovereign contrariwise is a figure of (non-positive) affirmation.

As we come to risk ourselves and the other, we will have become sovereign and will be able to accept the book for what it "is" a sovereign lover's gift: a sacrifice which expects no return, which is by its very definition useless splendor--and hence divine--as in "impossible, yet there it is" (Bataille, Erotism 206)--as in the schizophrenic's excessive table (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 6). Of this gift--the one given without reserve--Barthes's writes: "The gift is not necessarily excrement, but it has, nonetheless, a vocation as waste: the gift I receive is more than I know what to do with, it does not fit my space, . . . it is too much: 'What am I going to do with your present!'" (76). Indeed, what are we to do with Vitanza's gift? Nothing! and everything. We will ask, not what does it mean, what desire can it fulfill, what use can it serve, but we will ask: how to give?